Projects and Publications

When I was living in London I had a very minor involvement with activist feminist groups but this contact was mainly academic. When I started this project I would not have said I was an activist artist, rather that I was politically engaged. However now I would definitely consider myself an activist. Because I became so involved with this project I equally became totally embedded in activist culture. I believe that if I want to approach this subject from an honest perspective I have to take an activist standpoint. However something I have learned through this process is that everyone has to approach activism in their own way. As an artist I want to open a more nuanced discussion, one which acknowledges the personal rather than the theoretical.

Ireland Unfree’ is a Dazed mini-series telling the stories of Ireland’s bold fight for abortion rights, in the run up to the monumental referendum on the eighth amendment. Stirring protest, creativity, personal politics, and vital conversation, these Irish people push for autonomy. Here, we share their journey on Dazed.

Fertile Ground: reframing the abortion experience in art and activism

I've chosen photographers who seemed to engage a specific story, place or quality - whose vision mines that milieu for pictures that don't just attach themselves to a topic but properly render it either visually arresting or obscure, but also leave us with some imaginative or conceptual work to do ourselves. It's that that I want in a photograph or a body of work: a sense that however satisfying or startling or instructive the image, something more remains just out of reach.

For the duration of the festival an exhibition of photographs by Emma Campbell documenting journeys to abortion clinics in Liverpool and London 'When they put their hands out like scales — Journeys' is at Framewerk, 10 Upper Newtownards Road, Belfast, Tues March 8—Sat March 12.

This acknowledgement of one’s pain is tightly connected to the acknowledgment of one’s right to be protected from that pain – whether you think such pain belongs to the unborn or the women. The fact is women’s pain is a tricky subject to visualize: how do you illustrate the mental distress a woman can feel when facing a pregnancy she cannot take upon herself? How do you show the shame, loneliness and anxiety brought by having to travel overseas to terminate it? How do you picture the inner, physical and mental pain you can go through when having an abortion, especially in secrecy, with post-care being complicated? The silence surrounding abortion in Ireland echoes the visual blackout of women’s pain.

What do you call it when feminist podcasters have a conversation about female collaboration, draconian patriarchal laws and where we plan to stick them, and vulvas on churches (yes) with feminist abortion rights activists and artists, in front of a live audience that entirely consists of OTHER people devoted to fighting abortion stigma??

Perhaps most fundamentally, medical abortion poses serious challenges for the enforcement of any prohibition of abortion, raising serious issues for detection, proof and prosecution. 'How', asks one commentator, 'can a state control swallowing'?

Choosing Choice: Packing Up Stigma Exhibition features photographic works from ‘Against the Tide’ by Rose Comiskey (Ireland), ‘When They Hold Their Hands Out Like Scales’ by Emma Campbell (Northern Ireland) and digitised print works from ‘Good Women Have Abortions’ by Heather Ault (USA) with curatorial support by Jennette Donnelly.

All of the prurient details of the recent disgraceful case, where a 21-year-old was convicted and given a three-month suspended sentence for taking abortion pillsshe bought online, have been documented in this newspaper and others, some even going so far as to suggest a 10- to 12-week foetus is a “baby boy”. I’ve had a miscarriage at 10 weeks and what I lost could no more be described as a baby as a ball of wool could seriously be called a jumper.

In 1985, The Female Line: Northern Irish Women Writers was published. A pioneering anthology at the time, it gave many Northern Irish women writers their first opportunity for publication. Now, over thirty years later,Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland – a stunning mosaic of work by some of the best contemporary women writers from Northern Ireland – acts as both a new staging post and a sequel to its vibrant feminist predecessor.